I don’t even remember what the man said about authorizing military action against ISIS. So enamored was I with the application with which I was using to study. This is still rough – and it will take some time before I am satisfied with an intermediate stopping point. I still don’t have a product in mind. I am in a process of perpetual revelation as I draw from live video. Refinement, with “mischief,” will come with repeated viewings of the recorded feed.

In this doodle, I didn’t resize the bush. I merely scaled the drawing and the brush remained the same size. During the refinement process, I listen to the recorded video again. Wait. I think he was president pro tempore. Ugh. It will be a tediously tight loop of video.

]]>http://resdet.com/2015/02/19/incidentally-boozman/feed/0Processing the IS propaganda featuring the immolation of Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh (in progress)http://resdet.com/2015/02/09/processing-the-is-propaganda-featuring-the-immolation-of-lt-muath-al-kaseasbeh-in-progress/
http://resdet.com/2015/02/09/processing-the-is-propaganda-featuring-the-immolation-of-lt-muath-al-kaseasbeh-in-progress/#commentsMon, 09 Feb 2015 19:48:33 +0000http://resdet.com/?p=1638When I sat myself down determined to view the video that included the caged immolation of Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh I was doing something I had promised myself I would not do again. I have writhed and wrestled through codec-crushed amateur beheading videos. Then, needing the balance of the reciprocal abject destruction I went in search of other imagery. I viewed the victims of bombing. Of drone attacks and the torn bodies of collateralized children. The cumulative affect was nausea and confusion. The nausea persists in an acclimatized state of aggravated psychological disarray. Since I’m actively coping with the experience of having seen this imagery years ago, I told myself I needn’t see any more of it. Yet there i was preparing my recidivistic ritual. Isolating myself from my family at my computer during the waning morning hours while they were asleep. A web search yielded a story about FoxNews having conveniently and controversially uploaded it. As Fox’s warning faded and the video began my viscera-cramping pre-vomit anticipation eased as delightful motion graphics flitted and beeped across the screen. I had read that the video was on the long side. 20+ minutes. I didn’t know why. Turns out the imagery (i lack the benefit of understanding the spoken narration) for the first 15 minutes builds the case for the execution of the Jordanian pilot. The production value in the current ISIS promulgation rivaled anything fox news has ever done and was on par with some of the stuff I had seen in my tenure as a design director for a video broadcast/film post-production facility. High quality resolution, compelling cinematography, composited with sophisticated motion graphics with a cool black background lulled me gently into my seat – rendering me reflexively receptive. For the first 3/4 of the production images and video of victims of war folded into and between layers of slick infographics built up a context for the carnage that placed culpability squarely on the Jordanian pilot. Watching the composited cooperative Muath walking through and casually considering the heat-distorted imagery of devastation rendered around him, my sentiment was being pulled in line with the captors who provided a masked gauntlet through which he was led to his cage, “he deserves to die.” This visceral conviction in his culpability was reinforced by editing satellite imagery with shredded children layered within stylized pyrotechnics. Another layer, one of cool meta-data: Sterile HUD animations and technical drawings of specific aircraft created the sense of corroborating data. My frenzied sense of injustice and desire for retribution lasted past the point in the video after the fancy graphics yielded to a more theatrical tone. The color pallet switched from a black bed that supported layers of visuals and data to a sun-drenched desert (had he been accused of bombing this area?). Camera panned around a caged Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh clad in fluid-stained orange overalls. The sand around him was stained wet and a line of moist sand led from the cage to a masked man in khaki battle fatigues holding an unlit torch. A series of edits cut to masked faces of identically clad men holding automatic rifles. These evenly-timed edits reinforced the imminent military urgency. The captive looked up to the sky. The torch was lit and applied to the stained ground. Fire spread and quickly engulfed the figure. He writhed. Holding his face and staggered within the confines of the cage. He stood for an astonishingly long time. I must admit that I watched with the sense that this was terrible. His screams were terrible. War was terrible and does terrible things to people. That I was able to dehumanize him as his anguished cries surrounded me (the only audio that i understood in the whole of the production besides the graphic-accompanying sterile blips and devastating pyrotechnics) was terrible. I experienced none of the nausea i had anticipated. Non of the confusion. Was this healing? The burning figure dropped to it’s knees. Charred-black head bowed and silent, it became motionless.

When his nose melted off, my viscera clenched as nausea swept through me. Rather than vomit, I became enraged: “These antediluvian fanatical fuckers need to need to be spread like the shit they believe. Throw all the muslims the jews the christians in that fucking cage. And every other fear-deluded fuck who chooses a fantasy rather than admitting there are things we don’t know!” When the front-end loader abruptly dumped the rocks on the cage, crushing it and his ashen remains (reminiscent of a scene from Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry”) The dust cleared. Close take on the ruble revealed a charred hand. I was emotionally yanked in another direction. I felt complicit. I felt sympathy. Sympathy for the masked men who lit the fire. Sympathy for the pilot, for his family, for all of us. As the slick graphics returned with images of other Jordanian pilots and their probable current locations I was trembling. I asked myself how can this cycle of violence end – hoping for some internal “dialog.” There was no response. Reason had “left the building.” My usual convictions paled. A purge of inbred antediluvian assumptions about fundamentals leading to an increase in the capacity for a revelatory process that would reduce our more reactionary tendencies and increase compassion? I drank too much in high school to trust my formulation of cure-all abstractions. I can’t blame theists for this. I don’t trust pacifists with this. “Be Kind” doesn’t resonate here. Then again, maybe it does.

I usually appeal to non-violence in general, while on a personal level, I cope with rage that seems to result from a grandiose sense of injustice, a capriciously-permeable sense of personal boundaries, and a refracting concept of will. Will and control – assumptions about which result from my confusion about “otherness.” It’s difficult to trust anything in the dark. When one loses confidence in one’s processing, perceptions, how is empathy possible? My “fight or flight” mechanism kicks in. I fight. For my life. Part of me is aware that the threat is an illusion – but when the impulse overwhelms that reasoning, i am capable of acting in hurtful and damaging ways. At times when I am overwhelmed with fear/rage, the sooner I am mindful of the kindness and forgiveness that has been extended to me the sooner the blind, all-encompassing impulse for violent self-preservation eases. I know violence, in my shame I feel at times I am the personification of violence. I admit the hubris and fealty to subjectivity in sharing my assumptions about my experience. I don’t mean to apply my limping rationalizations for my sins (not so much “missing the target” as being blind to it). I therefore concede this trolling irrelevance to the subject of immolation as entertainment. Indulge my conflation for a few more desperate sentences. The machinations of war (and entertainment) are deliberate. When ideals and expectations about humanity are challenged, desperation prevails. The impulse to rage codifies in a deliberate plan for deliverance. How to find a place where ideals like forgiveness, kindness, and trust prevail? It begins with those closest to you. Your family. Friends. Neighbors. But what if they are being blown up and you have no one or place to turn to?

After experiencing and sharing my responses to this production it seems to me that we, as a nation, have two choices. We either kill ‘em all with the understanding that every time we apply successful effort towards that goal we expand the set of our target range more, till eventually it includes ourselves. Alternatively, begin a healing process. How? We listen to those more nurturing voices? Ugh. I don’t know. Though I suspect “listening” will be one of the most active verbs in that plan. How about this? Self-sacrifice. The deleterious effect of Gandhi’s pacifism was responsible for how many lives lost? When I get this confused, I throw it all up in the air and ask myself whether the conspiracies are real? What about taking immolation into our own hands in solidarity with tibetan monks. How much control over this situation do i have? What can I do besides process it in a FB note? Next time i bump my head on an open over-head cabinet door, try to pause before shouting an expletive and slamming it shut with retribution. Because the slamming of that door and my screaming don’t affect the door or ease my being “unsettled” – it scares the kids. And if that’s the point – if my desire for control leaves me so challenged that I have to frighten kids into acquiescence, maybe i have a career in the media after all!

He was reading for role of Alaska’s favorite nepotist (and “write-in” incumbent), Lisa Murkowski, the even-keeled senator from the rugged state of Alaska. When this drawing started derailing, Murkowski, as the Ranking Member on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, was opening up the floor to amendment proposals to the KeystoneXL bill.